'Cave Bear' Loses In Translation From Page To Screen

April 8, 1986|By Jay Boyar, Sentinel Movie Critic

We've all heard stories about geniuses who were intellectually so far ahead of their times that they were considered crazy or stupid by the people around them. The Clan of the Cave Bear, a variation on this theme, is about a woman who is so physically advanced that others find her unattractive.

Set 35,000 years in the past, the film shows what happens when Alya, a Cro-Magnon foundling, is adopted by a Neanderthal tribe. To the dumpy, dark- haired people who make up the clan of the cave bear, the blond, lean Alya looks ugly.

This is amusing because we in the audience find the Neanderthals rather ape-like, while Alya, played by Daryl Hannah, is entrancing to our eyes. Not only that, but we know something the Neanderthals don't: Cro-Magnons like Alya will eventually triumph in the evolutionary sweepstakes. Her physical superiority is more than just cosmetic, and it's complemented by an intellectual edge.

This situation -- a small joke -- is the basis of the entire movie. Scene by scene, Alya asserts her special abilities to the amazement, consternation and occasional outrage of the clan. Nearly two hours of this sort of thing can begin to wear thin; the scenes acquire an air of inevitability, even in terms of the way they are structured. And yet, the film has its compensations.

Director Michael Chapman, an experienced cinematographer, is skilled in conveying ideas through pictures -- quite an advantage in a movie about people who aren't especially verbal. And Chapman's cinematographer, Jan De Bont, has a varied palette that responds to the visual demands of a world in transition. As Alya, Daryl Hannah (Splash) is the most fascinating camera subject on the primordial scene, a person of such commanding physical presence that she suggests strength even when her character must bow and hunker before tribal authority. Alya as a child is played by Emma Floria and, as an adolescent, by Nicole Eggert, so Hannah doesn't appear in the film's first half hour. Still, the performance is a compelling one.

Compliments are also due to Pamela Reed and James Remar, who give crafty performances as Alya's foster parents, Iza the medicine woman and Creb the mystic Mog-ur. As Broud, the tribe's loutish prince, Thomas G. Waites does laudably controlled work, conveying surly bravado without overdoing the job.

If you're familiar with Jean M. Auel's best-selling novel on which the movie is based, your biggest disappointment is likely to be that little of the book's anthropological detail has survived the transition to the screen. John Sayles, who wrote the script, has caught Auel's folkloric tone in the movie's narration. (''She must find her own people. She must walk alone. . . . For the first time, Alya felt the strength of her own spirit.'') But there was probably no way to have made a film of manageable length that would have preserved the subtleties of clan society as revealed in Auel's 500-page narrative.

The absence of such contextual information is particularly noticeable during the story's most intense moments. A scene showing Broud's rape of Ayla is powerful to be sure, but it would have had greater resonance had the filmmakers shown exactly to what extent Broud's me-Tarzan-you-Jane attitude fits in with the society he inhabits.

And the sequence showing the young Alya finding a new cave for the clan is flat; it plays as if she were merely a Realtor with a hot tip. The same scene has a mythic power in the novel because Auel goes to great lengths to explain just why, culturally and physically, the cave is ideally suited to the tribe. The resistance of the material to screen adaptation is a problem the movie makers never really overcome. But their film is intermittently involving anyway, even though their storytelling techniques, without the book's cultural underpinnings, often come off as, well, rather primitive.